lickety
English
Etymology
Fanciful variant of lick, a noun used regionally or informally as a synonym of sprint,[1] perhaps with -ety, a suffix used to extend monosyllabic words.[2]
Adverb
lickety
- (US, informal, usually compounded with a noun) At full speed, fast.
- lickety-cut
- lickety-split
- 1886, Bret Harte, “Chiquita”, in Abraham Firth, editor, Voices for the Speechless, page 95:
- Lickity, lickity, switch, we came to the ford, and Chiquita / Buckled right down to her work
- For more examples of usage of this term, see Citations:lickety.
References
- “lickety-split” in Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001–2019.
- “-ety, suffix.”, in OED Online
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, November 2010.
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